Wednesday, July 23, 2008

This article takes the provocative (but well-argued) position that Creative Commons / FLOSS -type licensing applied to scientific data is too restrictive and that the default licensing model for this data should be that it be in the public domain. The arguments are quite convincing: I think I may be convinced...

Abstract: Molecular biology data are subject to terms of use that vary widely between databases and curating institutions. This research presents a taxonomy of contractual and technical restrictions applicable to databases in life science. It builds upon research led by Science Commons demonstrating why open data and the freedom to integrate facilitate innovation and how this openness can be achieved. The taxonomy describes technical and legal restrictions applicable to life science databases, and its metadata have been used to assess terms of use of databases hosted by Life Science Resource Name (LSRN) Schema. While a few public domain policies are standardized, most terms of use are not harmonized, difficult to understand and impose controls that prevent others from effectively reusing data. Identifying a small number of restrictions allows one to quickly appreciate which databases are open. A checklist for data openness is proposed in order to assist database curators who wish to make their data more open to make sure they do so.

Friday, July 18, 2008

The proceedings for digital library conferences are a little hard to find. They are distributed across the ACM Digital Library, the IEEE Xplore, Springer's Lecture Notes on Computer Science (LNCS), and other less accessible sites. It is definitely not convenient having to look all over for these resources.

I've decided to collect what I could find here in this blog entry. If there are any missing (I am sure there are) please let me know and I will add them. NB: I've focused on the proceedings, and only listed the conference web sites when I couldn't find the proceedings.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The Scholarly Kitchen is a scholarly publishing & community blog looking at interesting projects, activities, other blogs, etc. I like its tone and its focus.Some recent postings include Open Access, the data vs. hypothesis debate, reputation and journal quality, happenings at/with PLoS, the h-index, applications not publications, etc.

I was on the BBC site watching a video on carnivorous slugs in Wales (really!) using the BBC Media Player, when I noticed that on trying to turn-up the volume, that the volume control went - well - up to eleven! I haven't seen this reported (Doh, just found someone found this on June 10), but this is perhaps a playful homage to Spinal Tap?

A recent article[1] looks at scientific research competitiveness of world universities in computer science, examining at individual university computer science departments as well countries as aggregates of their universities.

The study looks at 233 university computer science departments, 127418 published papers, 468244 citations, 1856 highly cited papers and 57 hot papers over the last 10 years using data from Thomson.

The evaluation criteria are (see the paper for more details):

Canada as an aggregate region came in #4 after the USA, UK, Germany, followed by Italy. Canada had the third highest paper production, citations, and "hot" papers!

For individual universities, only one Canadian university is in the top 23, with University of Toronto coming in at 16th. You can see the top 23 universities listed below:

Stanford

MIT

UC Berkeley

U Texas

U Illinois

Carnegie Mellon

UCSD

Georgia Inst Technol

U Maryland

Eth Zurich

Technion Israel Inst Technol

Princeton

U Washington

Tel Aviv University

Harvard

U Toronto

UCLA

UMichigan

U So Calif

U Minnesota

Natl Univ Singapore

Columbia

Cambridge

I decided to do a little analysis with the numbers from this report and to look at the efficiency of production of computer science research, as measured by papers produces per capita for the above top 5 countries (as reported in this paper). Using the population figures from the CIA World Factbook and the CS paper production rates reported, I get the following rankings:

It would seem that Canada is the most efficient country with respect to per capita production of Computer Science research papers among the top five Computer Science research countries (as measured by the criteria of, and data from, this paper). So Canadians - who are continuously harangued about their great inefficiencies in all sorts of things science and technology - should at least feel somewhat good about these results. :-)

While this data is from a peer-reviewed journal article, these results and these metrics should be viewed cautiously, perhaps even with a little salt... ;-)